When Your Grocery List Needs A Neural Network

The tech industry in a single image. Massive crowds fighting to post LinkedIn updates about how they're "leveraging agentic AI solutions" while VCs throw money at anyone who mentions the buzzword. Meanwhile, a handful of folks actually discuss job displacement risks, and even fewer build anything useful. And that lonely stick figure trying to generate actual value? That's the junior dev who just wanted to automate their unit tests but got pulled into an "AI transformation initiative." The hype-to-value ratio remains gloriously consistent across every tech wave I've survived since the dot-com bubble.

The schadenfreude is palpable. Senior devs have watched this movie before—junior copies ChatGPT code, junior deploys ChatGPT code, production server bursts into flames. There's a special kind of satisfaction watching someone learn the hard way that AI doesn't understand edge cases or business logic. It's the circle of dev life: you either die a ChatGPT believer or live long enough to become the cackling senior who saw it coming.

Remember when we used to write our own algorithms? Now we're just watching ChatGPT and Deepseek haul our careers up the mountain while we take a nap in the sleeping bag of obsolescence. And the worst part? We have the audacity to brag about our "productivity" like we actually did something impressive. "Look how far I climbed" – yeah buddy, you typed a prompt and took a coffee break while the AI did all the heavy lifting. The only muscle you've exercised is your index finger hitting Ctrl+V.

That face when the junior dev confidently explains an AI-generated pull request that's 90% hallucinated features and 10% actual code. The smug little smile says it all: "I totally understand what's happening here" while internally panicking about what await Promise.resolve(undefined).then(() => Math.random() > 0.5 ? 'success' : throw new Error('oops')) is supposed to accomplish. The code review is scheduled for 3pm and Stack Overflow is already open in 17 tabs.

Remember that existential dread when ChatGPT dropped? Programmers lined up at the gallows, convinced our jobs were toast. Meanwhile, mathematicians are just sipping coffee like, "Welcome to the club, rookies." They've been watching calculators steal their thunder since the 70s and somehow survived to tell the tale. The career apocalypse is always "just around the corner" until you realize most tools just handle the boring parts while we move on to more interesting problems. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Behold, the classic tech startup lifecycle: "I built this with no-code tools!" → "Help, I'm being hacked because I have no idea what I'm doing!" Nothing says "technical founder" like bragging about using Cursor AI to build your entire SaaS product, then acting shocked when your security falls apart like wet toilet paper. Meanwhile, actual developers are charging $1,000/hour to clean up the AI-generated spaghetti code. The "I'm not technical" confession after claiming AI built everything is just *chef's kiss*. Turns out you still need to understand what you're doing. Who knew?